I'm not sure where the slowdown he is seeing is coming from so I'll quiz him on that, but clicking the song and hiding the dock icon are good ideas.

He has a pretty eclectic playlist :)

Happy Matt?

The big change is that it's now designed to stay running all the time. When you pause or stop iTunes, the hut window will tastefully fade away. When iTunes fires up again, it will come back. There are a number of new options in the prefs window to support that such as adding to your login items.

Available now :)

I also changed the framework used by the prefs window, so let me know if there are any issues or raise a bug: http://mark.aufflick.com/software/heads-up-tunes/bugs

The much awaited version 0.2 of my iTunes thingamy is now released! Version 0.1 installations should find the update automatically or go to the home page to download it yourself.

You can now resize the window yourself, so it can be skinny or wide:

You can turn off the shadow if you wish, and it now remembers it's window position between runs. And that's about it :)

No comments about my music selection please!

When I'm listening to music I like to know what tracks are queued up. Call me a control freak.

One doesn't normally have enough screen space to leave iTunes visible though, so I figured what I wanted was a heads up style panel, floating above all other applications, showing the current and upcoming songs. Something like the image on the right:

Surprisingly, no such app existed. There are many heads up controllers (which I don't need since I control tracks and level from my Apple bluetooth keyboard media function keys), or artwork viewers that display the current track only. There was no alternative but to suspend my study plan for an evening and write my own.

The result is heads up 'tunes. It's lightweight, nothing fancy (although I will add animation to it one day). You can download the current version at the software home page:

http://mark.aufflick.com/software/heads-up-tunes/

Here's the blurb from the about box:

This is a preliminary version of heads up 'tunes.

Pretty much all this program does is display the current and next two iTunes™ tracks in a "heads up" style window. It works fine with genius and party shuffle as well as manual and smart playlists. Results will be disappointing when using regular shuffle mode since it is not possible to determine what track will come next.

Please visit http://mark.aufflick.com/software/heads-up-tunes for future releases.

Please email any bug reports to mark@aufflick.com.

© Copyright 2008 Mark Aufflick. This software is free for you to use. No warranty is provided with this software except that which cannot be excluded by such disclaimers. This is free pre-release software - use at your own risk :) iTunes™ is a Trade Mark of Apple.

Oh, and it also sets its dock icon to the current track artwork. It's a Universal binary and has been tested on PPC (by me) and Intel (by Matt B and DB). Enjoy!